CHARLOTTE, N.C.—When Kyrie Irving actually vocalizes the words, he can’t help but smile.

“Five years,” he says with a grin, then pauses. “That’s extremely difficult.”

Irving’s plan isn’t about making the All-Star Game. It isn’t about winning NBA championships. It isn’t about landing a massive free-agent contract. And it isn’t about playing in the Olympics, either. It’s about accomplishing something that’s long been part of his life blueprint.

He has five years to get his college degree.

Actually, less than that. The five-year clock started ticking the moment NBA commissioner David Stern announced the former Duke point guard was Cleveland’s choice as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 draft last June.

“You may interpret it as ambitious, but we’re an education family,” says his father, Drederick, who was in Charlotte on Monday afternoon for the Cavaliers’ game against the Bobcats. “So for Kyrie, a five-year agreement to get his degree, that isn’t anything that’s foreign. He understands that a lot of people in our family, they have their degree, so it’s kind of inevitable for him that he’ll get his.”

His older sister Asia, a junior accounting major at Temple, was at the game Monday, as was his aunt Danette Irving. Tutu, as everyone calls Drederick’s sister, earned her undergraduate degree from St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, N.C., and her master's in social work from Howard University. “One thing about our family,” she says, “we’ve always encouraged Kyrie to be a student first and an athlete second.”

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That’s why Irving might have been the first No. 1 pick in the history of the NBA Draft to celebrate the honor by spending the summer as a full-time Duke student. While the NBA owners and players went back-and-forth during a bitter lockout, Irving was chipping away at the promise he made to his father.

A sophomore academically—his major is psychology—he found that school wasn’t necessarily easier just because he didn’t have to balance the demands of studying and playing for Mike Krzyzewski.

“I’ll just say, it was a little harder to get up for classes at the end of the summertime with no academic adviser telling you to get up every time,” he says, cracking that smile again. “But I still enjoyed myself and finished out the classes, finished out the semester. It was good.”

Irving’s been “good” at this basketball thing, too.

Even though the Cavaliers were obviously confident enough in his ability to pick him No. 1 overall, that opinion wasn’t necessarily shared by everybody in the NBA. Remember, the 6-foot-3 Irving played just 11 games at Duke during a freshman season marred by a foot injury.

“Nobody really scouted him that much—you couldn’t—so how could you know? But (the Cavaliers) did a great job,” Bobcats coach Paul Silas says. “They knew. He’s going to be terrific, he really is. He’s surprising everybody, I think.”

And Silas paid Irving that compliment before the Cleveland rookie dropped 25 points and seven assists on his team in an eight-point victory Monday. Through 12 games, Irving leads the Cavaliers with 17.7 points and 5.3 assists per game. He’s shooting 48.2 percent from the field and 41.9 percent from beyond the 3-point line.

He’s the clear favorite for the Rookie of the Year Award. He’s also just 19 years old.

“It’s unbelievable,” veteran Cavaliers forward Antawn Jamison says. “I sit there and think about my rookie year and feeling lost. Let’s be honest, this is a lockout season, too, so a lot of the things he would have learned and gotten comfortable with with more preseason games, it wasn’t there for him.”

There have been offensive adjustments to make in the NBA—according to the Synergy Sports database, he runs the pick-and-roll on nearly twice as many possessions with the Cavs (40.3 percent) as he did at Duke (20.5 percent)—and there are certainly areas that need improvement. He has the size and quickness to be a defensive force, but he’s not one yet. There are times he loses his man when he’s not on the ball, and he has a tendency to stand still when his guy gives up the ball.

“I think he’s developing into a floor leader, and I think that’s going to take time,” Cleveland coach Byron Scott says. “The way he finishes around the basket is pretty impressive. The way he uses the goal as another defender, the way he reads the pick-and-rolls has been great. He still has a lot of room to grow, and I think he knows that. We’re pushing him to get better, but he’s definitely heading in the right direction.”

The team is heading in the right direction, too. The Cavaliers were just 19-63 last year (a .232 winning percentage) but are 6-6 this season with a roster that includes Irving and plenty of holdovers who have embraced their teenage point guard. “Every single day you learn something new,” Irving says. “It’s definitely not easy, but I’m enjoying the process, so that’s the most important thing for me.”

It’s the most important thing until this spring, that is, when expects to head back to Duke. That college degree is happening, probably sooner than later.

And, as he closes out his impressive first month in the NBA, those other things—the All-Star games, an NBA title, the massive contract and the spot in the Olympics—are starting to look inevitable, too.